Dennis Marsden

Dennis Marsden has died. He was, as his obituary in today's Guardian says "an inspirational sociologist".We, working class Grammar School pupils, fresh from university, on our one year postgraduate teacher training course at Goldsmith's College in 1968, recognised ourselves in his book, written with Brian Jackson, "Education and the Working Class" (1961), who "having broken through [the class barriers] to gain university entry found themselves at sea", as the Guardian obituary writer puts it.  On the last day of term, with Christmas upon us, Linda, the first (like myself) member of her family ever to go to University, sat in the Goldsmiths' near emptied refectory and wept, not wanting to go home, to a family to whom she was already a stranger, speaking a different language. Qualified, she got her first teaching post at Cheltenham Ladies College.

It was heady stuff; heady times. "Family and Kinship in East London" (1957), by Michael (later Lord) Young and Peter Willmott, a study of working class community life in Bethnal Green, in the east end of London, resonated in the same way. In this climate, comprehensive education took root. Who now remembers the furore that attended Penguin's publication of Leila Berg's book "Risinghill: Death of a Comprehensive"? Risinghill School became a battleground between fixed positions, old versus new. We invited Risinghill's Head teacher, Michael Duane, and his wife to dinner at the Goldsmith's student union. (We also invited Michael X, who didn't turn up, and Jack Dash, the veteran dockers' union leader who did. Heady stuff, indeed.)

Yet in the air too were new approaches to research based on in depth interviews, such as those undertaken by Marsden and Jackson; pioneers of qualitative research methods, which were dismissed or patronised as invalid, lacking in rigor, context and theory by other academics.  When Andrew Sutton writes of research and conductive education and the demand to 'show us your evidence", here in 1968, with Jackson and Marsden, was when I awoke to that debate.  It was also at that time when I first heard the names Luria and Vigotski. If I had known then their value to me now and to conductive education, I would have paid more attention!